Updating My About-Me Slide, 2017 Edition

As I was prepping for SQLSaturday Houston, I realized it’s been two years since I updated my About-Me slide at the start of my presentations. Here’s what it was for quite a while:

About Me, circa 2016

This time around, I decided to start from scratch and ask:

Who am I writing this for? Like any presenter, it’s tough for me to generalize everyone in the audience into a single bucket. Some folks have chosen to sit in my session because they recognized my name, but others don’t know me or why I’m talking about this topic. That makes defining a single target audience pretty difficult, so I’ll define 2 attendees:

• The first-timer: doesn’t recognize my name, and doesn’t know what my job/blog/SQL history is
• The regular: knows my name, has seen me present before, read my stuff, and knows what they’re in for

What do I want them to learn on the slide? I want both types of target attendees to learn something, so I decided to split the slide into two halves:

• For the first-timer: my job history
• For the regular: my community projects

Business on the left, party on the right

I’ll spend 15-30 seconds covering each side by saying:

Left side: “My name is Brent Ozar. I make SQL Servers faster and more reliable. I got my start as a developer, then moved into database administration, and VM and SAN administration. I’m talking about today’s topic because (insert relevant detail here, pointing at the part of my job history where I needed to work with that technology.) If you need me, the best way to contact me is Help@BrentOzar.com.”

Right side: “If you like today’s session, you might like some of my other free community projects. GroupBy.org is an online conference where you pick the sessions, and it’s all online for free. sp_Blitz is my free SQL Server health check, and I give away a ton of other stuff at these other sites. How many of you have used something from this screen? Okay, great! Now let’s get started.”

It’s more text-heavy than I’d prefer. I’m tempted to break it into two slides – getting paid and giving back – but that feels like it’d be violating the one-page-resume rule. I’ll probably cut down some of the right hand list to just my favorite community contributions though.